For years, some American farmers fixed their own John Deere tractors with cracked software traded on invite-only forums and sourced from Ukraine , according to a March 2017 Motherboard investigation. They owned the machines outright. They were still locked out of repairing them.

In July, the Federal Trade Commission and five states reached a settlement requiring Deere to give farmers and independent mechanics the same repair resources its dealers get for the next decade: fault codes, reprogramming, manuals and the ability to restart a machine after an emissions shutdown.

Under this headline is a business model shift that matters to anyone scanning for businesses in demand right now.

A One-Time Equipment Sale Is A Hard Business

For a century, equipment makers ran the same playbook. Design a machine, build it, sell it once.

That sale is expensive to win. A combine, an excavator or a water pump station is a major capital purchase, so sales cycles run long and every deal needs technical salespeople who can speak to engineers and operators. Margins on the machine are thin, and demand collapses whenever farm incomes, construction starts or oil prices fall.

Then the warranty expires, and the customer walks. Owners take their parts orders and repairs to the local dealer or the independent shop down the road, and the manufacturer loses touch with a machine that will run for another 20-40 years.

Those years are where the money is. Parts, filters, fluids, repairs and service contracts are high margin, recurring and paid in good years and bad.

Caterpillar’s services business, which includes aftermarket parts, brought in $24 billion in 2025 . The machine is how a manufacturer wins the customer. The decades after are where the customer becomes valuable.

Who Owns The Customer After The Sale

Construction fleets, oil and gas operators, mining companies and water treatment plants all run on critical machines with decades of parts and service attached, and that relationship usually belongs to a distributor or a local repair shop.

Deere is a sharper case. Its roughly 2,050 dealer locations in the U.S. and Canada are independently owned, but Deere appoints them, approves changes in who owns them and contractually requires them to promote its parts.

The lock kept independent shops out. The settlement lets them back in, which puts every Deere owner back into contested ground.

The reason manufacturers fight this hard is valuation. Recurring revenue is steadier than equipment sales, and investors value the company at a higher multiple.

Manufacturers Are Building Their Own Aftermarket Businesses

Instead of leaving those years to dealers, more manufacturers are standing up aftermarket departments of their own.

At its investor day last December, Deere said it has more than 10 million pieces of active equipment in its installed base and is launching John Deere Essentials, a cheaper parts line aimed at owners of mid-life machines who have drifted to other suppliers. It also said it is expanding extended warranties, maintenance, monitoring and service contracts, calling that work a newer initiative for Deere and its dealers.

Caterpillar is further along. Its 2026 proxy statement credits growth to more than 1.6 million connected machines, condition monitoring and parts sold through e-commerce.

This is a different business from building equipment. Selling a machine takes engineers and a handful of specialist salespeople. Selling the aftermarket takes a parts catalog tracked across thousands of part numbers, buyers who source and stock those parts, quoting staff who answer fast, shipping and drop-shipping for small orders, field technicians and service contracts that renew every year. It needs different software, different hiring and a different sales rhythm.

Some manufacturers decide the prize is worth the rebuild. Others stay in the equipment business and let dealers and independent shops keep the long tail.

The Business Gap On All Sides

All sides of this contest have needs the market has not met.

Manufacturers building an aftermarket arm are assembling capabilities they never needed before. Many still know little about how to set up a new business model to compete with local dealers.

Equipment owners have the opposite problem. A combine that breaks mid-harvest and waits five days for a diagnosis can cost a farm its season. A water treatment plan being down can cost thousands of dollars per hour. They need instant access to service, repairs and parts.

Independent service and parts providers sit in the middle. Many are small, local operations. They need help with managing service team, scheduling and back office help.

Any business that sells a product with a long life faces the same question: who owns the 20 years after the sale, when it brings recurring and high margin?

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